Google puts polish on Chrome 8

Almost a month after releasing the beta - and right on schedule - Google has moved Chrome 8 up into the stable channel.

The big addition in this release is an inbuilt PDF viewer. This lets you open the documents as if they were web pages, and while functionality is fairly limited, there are controls to search, zoom and skip through pages. It's also lightning fast, and runs in a sandbox separate from the rest of the browser to help prevent malicious code lurking within the PDF from reaching the host PC.

Obviously there are a huge number of tweaks, fixes and performance improvements as well, and the team has reportedly squashed more than 800 lingering bugs and patched up a few high-profile security holes.

The Dev channel has also been updated this week. The big feature here is the transfer of the Flash plugin to its own sandbox, where it will join the HTML rendering and JavaScript execution components. This should help to make systems much more secure, especially on Windows XP, where Chrome is apparently the only browser to support this feature. However, all users will be able to feel a little better protected from some common malware.

The latest stable version of Chrome is available now, although most users should be automatically upgraded sometime in the next few days. The Dev and Canary builds are also available for the brave and while the beta channel has been updated, it's currently exactly the same build as in the stable channel.

Considerably faster than Firefox. Opening a first instance of the browser is almost instantaneous, even on an old laptop. Pages load, render, and scroll much smoother than Firefox as well. And far less vertical space is wasted on bars and buttons and nonsense like that.

Chrome's way faster than FF (tested on Ubuntu and Windows XP), and it's also faster than IE8 too.

I tend to use Chrome/FF about 50/50 these days. Chrome's great for when I'm impatient and the iGoogle integration is nice, FF has all the AdBlock+/NoScript stuff, so it's better for browsing those annoying sites where there's more ads than content. I also prefer FF's handling of bookmarks, but I'll acknowledge that there's something to be said for Chrome's “minimalist” interface.

Oh, and Chrome v's FF on a netbook - no contest - I hardly use FF at all now, Chrome is just so much nicer on that kind of low powered hardware, (Meego 1.1 and Ubuntu 10.10UNR used).

Good call from Hexus - I got 8.0.552.215-r67652 pushed out to my Ubuntu 10.04 system about five minutes ago. :hexlub: